Low and Lower (with Update)

Hillary Clinton's campaign continues to set new lows in continuing to be the most pernicious, vile and monstrous lying bunch of morally depraved politicians that the Democratic party has seen in a long time. They may even be going beyond the corruption routinely practiced by their new hero, Karl Rove.

In this past week, rabid Hillaryites were screaming to CNN that Obama had better offer the vp to Clinton or they will scorch the party, and the Clinton campaign blamed this talk on the Obama campaign.

Today the Clinton campaign accelerated its attempt to blame the Obama campaign for the shock, horror and disgusted reaction to her RFK remarks. Two of her chief idiots, the vampire Terry McAuliffe and the werewolf Howard Wolfson went on the Sunday talk shows to make these obscene charges, even though when asked, Barack Obama attempted to excuse Clinton's comments as misspeaking in a long campaign. Can you even imagine what the Clinton campaign would be doing and saying had Obama made anything approaching the stupidity (best interpretation, since her "historical" references were inaccurate in just about every way) and creepiness of Clinton's statement? There's some projection being played here, as well as indecent politics.

And even after all the horror expressed in the media--including the NY Times and Washington Post--Hillary Clinton herself got an oped placed in the New York Daily News defending her RFK remarks. Not apologizing for them, but defending them. There is no defense for them, on historical or any other grounds. RFK's assassination had nothing whatever to do with the fact that the 1968 nomination went beyond the first week of June. Nothing. In refusing to confront the inference that practically everyone has made, she continues to enact the kind of denial that we know so well from the current president. This country cannot afford another such individual anywhere near the White House.

Meanwhile, Obama picked up 3 add-on super-delegates. On Sunday he filled in for Ted Kennedy to give the commencement address at Wesleyan University. It was a call to service, a preview of his administration, a tribute to Ted Kennedy and a peek at his own youth, college days and first job. It's about twenty minutes and worth the time, and on YouTube right here.

Monday Update: 3 more super-dels today. The Obamagic Number is 49. In latest Montana poll, Obama is ahead by 17 points.

Grim and Grimmer (with Updates)

Clinton's assassination comment got a lot of play on cable news; Keith O. spent almost the entire Countdown on it, plus a special comment. I'd rather it didn't get any mention--it isn't something you want in the air--but it's taken on a life of its own. I was surprised but impressed by the number of people--like historian Douglas Brinkley--as well as bloggers, who said that this is a disqualifier, and indeed may have ended not only her presidential bid but unless she begs for forgiveness in very explicit terms, ended her political career.

She said it was an historical comment, but that only makes it more bizarre. Others have pointed out that there are many better examples of the race extended into June and beyond that don't involve a candidate being killed. But what I haven't seen anyone note is that it isn't even accurate in terms of the 1968 Democratic nomination. By winning California, Bobby Kennedy had successfully become the candidate with the most primary wins, and he defeated Sen. Eugene McCarthy. But he wasn't the nominee--not even the presumptive nominee. The whole system was different then. Primaries didn't yet decide the candidate. RFK was still facing a summer of fighting for the nomination against the sitting Vice President, Hubert Humphrey (who by the way, didn't run in the primaries, so Clinton's argument for staying in the race falls apart right there.) The nomination was going to be decided at the convention--just as it had been in 1960, when JFK had won the most primaries, but was facing a lot of opposition.

But back then, campaigns were shorter. They didn't really begin until Labor Day. The nominee wasn't the nominee until the convention said so. It's very different now, and McCain is already leading a Republican Party that will not offer another candidate to oppose him at their convention. The harm that Clinton is doing is obvious from just this week in Florida, when Obama tried to take advantage of McCain's lobbyist problem, but Clinton's big mouth took attention away.

What this probably will end is any speculation that Hillary will be on the ticket. Despite the latest threat from a rabid Hillaryite. (Like the Obama fundraising operation is going to be scared by the in-debt Hillary fundraiser threatening to hold back funds.)

Ambinder rates the vp choices this way:

1. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS) -- Obama really likes her; that's very important.
2. The Virginia boys: Kaine and Webb
3. Gov. Ted Strickland (D-OH) -- the Clinton stand in.
4. Gov. Janet Napolitano (D-AZ)
5. Sen. Hillary Clinton -- there's a fine balance between subtle pressure and overt hectoring
Wild card: Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE)

This is the best list I've seen so far, except for 3. and 5. Hillary is out, and I don't have the slightest idea why anybody thinks Obama is going to choose a buffoon like Ted Strickland. I still see him standing behind Hillary nodding as she cries, "Shame on you, Barack Obama!"

UPDATE: The New York Times describes the political firestorm set off by Clinton's RFK remark. In part:

Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, which has refrained from engaging Mrs. Clinton in recent days, said her statement “was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign.”

Privately, aides to Mr. Obama were furious about the remark.

Concerns about Mr. Obama’s safety led the Secret Service to give him protection last May, before it was afforded to any other presidential candidate, although Mrs. Clinton had protection, too, in her capacity as a former first lady. Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, voiced concerns about his safety before he was elected to the Senate, and some black voters have even said such fears weighed on their decision of whether to vote for him.

It was against that backdrop that Mrs. Clinton’s mentioning the Kennedy assassination in the same breath as her own political fate struck some as going too far. Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, an uncommitted superdelegate, said through a spokeswoman that the comments were “beyond the pale.”

Update 2: Here's the transcript of Keith's Special Comment. Here's a Kos diary that collects some of the other comment on Hillary's RFK statement, including an excerpt from a piece by Libby Copeland in the Washington Post: "There are taboos in presidential politics, and this is one of the biggest. To raise the specter of a rival's assassination, even unintentionally, is to make a truly terrible thing real. It sounds like one might be waiting for a terrible thing to happen, even if one isn't. It sounds almost like wishful thinking...

The fear of a president or a presidential candidate being shot or assassinated is horrifying precisely because recent history teaches us that it can happen. We don't need anybody to remind us, and we certainly don't need anybody to remind whatever suggestible wackos might be lurking in the shadows.
In the context of Obama, Clinton's words broke a double taboo, because since the beginning of his candidacy, some of Obama's supporters have feared that his race made him more of a target than other presidential hopefuls. Obama was placed under Secret Service protection early, a full year ago. To be unaware that one's words tap into a monumental fear that exists in a portion of the electorate -- a fear that Obama's race could get him killed -- is an unusual mistake for a serious and highly disciplined presidential candidate.
It's surprising, too, because something very similar just happened last week, when Mike Huckabee made a joke at an NRA convention about somebody aiming a gun at Obama. He later apologized and called his remarks "offensive." He also could have called them "instructive" for any politician paying attention."

Another diary at Kos points out the fear, especially in the black community, that someone will try to kill Obama, the death threats his campaign receives, and despite Secret Service protect, the courage displayed when Obama campaigns so openly.

Speaking of all this openly may increase the danger, and yet it may also increase vigilance. It did bring into the public dialogue the fears that apparently many people have had, including me. Of course, Clinton introducing this as a reason to stay in the race is abhorrent in the extreme.

Without Robert Kennedy: We Are Lonelier in America

A version of this essay was frontpaged today on Daily Kos.

This would have been Robert F. Kennedy's 80th birthday. It comes at a moment of intense political polarization, in a nation roiled by an unpopular war characterized by official deceit. Many of Robert Kennedy's words on Vietnam could be dropped into the newspaper today and they would be just as relevant.

If he were a politican today, there would be many in the blososphere ripping into him daily, this one, charging him with opportunism, cynical and self-centered politics, and trading on his name and wealthy family.

Kennedy was himself a polarizing figure, although his words were of reconcilation. That in part was what made him polarizing. His positions on various issues did not satisfy the templates of the left or right. Yet he was the only white politician who had the passionate support and love of many blacks. He was the only political leader who spent time on Indian reservations and tiny Inuit villages as well as southern rural and white West Virgina mountain shanty towns.

He inspired passions for and passions against. People wanted to touch him, and he needed to touch others--he seemed to learn through touch. He learned through children, extending the feelings of a father to compassion for all children.

He grew up in privilege, and his early meetings with black leaders were not warm. Yet by 1968, when Martin Luther King was shot and killed, his widow asked Robert Kennedy to arrange to have his body moved from Memphis to Atlanta. His impromptu speech, passing on the news of King's assassination in a black neighborhood where he happened to be, is one of his most famous.

If we took Robert Kennedy out of time, and dropped him into our own, he would find a different country in many ways. There are about twice as many people in the United States. The racial and ethnic composition has changed. In 1968, one parent usually did the earning for the family, the man in most white families, and increasingly the woman in single parent poor black families. Two paycheck families, let alone two parents with five or six jobs between them, were rare.

But the social needs and injustices are largely the same. Kennedy spoke in favor of national health care coverage in 1968, a cause his brother Ted would champion and keep on the agenda for many years.

Politically, the parties were stronger. Democrats had deep organizations in the cities, and industrial unions were strong. But the Democratic party was also coming apart. JFK knew that by leading on civil rights, the Democrats would lose their hold on the solid South. 1968 would see Richard Nixon exploit this. Vietnam was itself tearing younger people like me away from the party. Eugene McCarthy ran within the party, but he was not really of it. Robert Kennedy was, and his candidacy may have kept many young people in the party.

I happened to catch some of the C-Span coverage of a commemoration of his birthday, and saw John Lewis say that this would be a very different country today if he had been President, and I've known in my heart for a long time that this is true. But the emotion I felt I later understood as this: loneliness. Robert Kennedy's death made this a very lonely country for me.

Robert Kennedy took on that last political fight, knowing the odds were against him, knowing that violence was in the air. He was a warrior for peace. It is important to remember even as we stand up against the cynical and cowardly violence of the rabid right, that Robert Kennedy's last crusade was this: as he said to a largely black audience in that unwritten speech on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

I could quote his Vietnam speeches, emphasizing the horror for the victims of war. But Robert Kennedy's life, and a great deal of the promise of America, was ended by an act of violence in June 1968. So I quoted instead Kennedy's first major speech was just after King's death, and after the violent riots that torched and destroyed significant parts of many cities. In some cities, like Washington, it would be more than a decade before those areas recovered.

"For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, this poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men.

And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family , then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies---to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look on our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear--only a common desire to retreat from each other--only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what program to enact.

The question is whether we can find in our midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can niether be enobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land."

Robert F. Kennedy
in Ohio April 4, 1968